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this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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Groff is indeed such a crap format to write documentation in. It nearly reads like zalgo.
I can't wait for the anti markdown people to come out of the woodwork though and complain that it's "the progressivist agenda" to be more user friendly because devs aren't users.
"If you can't write Groff, maybe you dont deserve to read the output"
"The markdown evangelists are so annoying. You can't just rewrite everything in markdown"
"When will this markdown craze stop??? I can't hear it anymore!"
Identity politics entered the developer arena.
Missing features in Markdown:
I'm not saying not to use md (vs. asciidoc/tor, restex or orgmode) but to add the features please.
Someone can correct this but iirc some implementations of markdown have image options like this:
Others put the size in
{ }after the main image item.Rich text is contrary to the structural focus of markdown. Why should it be added?
Guess we have a semantics problem here. I understand under "rich text" text with formatting, not the long since dead file format. Markup is the language used to add richness to the plain text, no?
Sorry I was trying to follow your meaning, because the example of absent rich text you gave was underlines. There is already basic text formatting support such as strong, emphasis, headings and links.
You could style any, all or none of those to have underlining. Whatever chosen rendering, they all have meaning independent from the applied style. What you are asking for is to have something that is purely a display style without any structural value. This is not coming to markdown any time soon. Hardly anyone uses underline as its own thing in html anymore, for good reasons.
Maybe this article will help to further explain.
Native SVG handling would be completely out of scope. The point of markdown is that it is supposed to be understandable in its plain text format. SVG is incompatible with that. The closest thing would be like mermaid charts but I think it's quite a stretch even then.
I think you should just use HTML, it has a much larger array of tools that would suit your needs. Markdown is purposely constrained because it enables much more portability.